Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide access to the Internet for clients of the ISPs. Direct access by each Internet user to the Internet backbone is not typically implemented as a direct connection to the Internet backbone because such a direct connection is expensive and is generally limited in geographical availability. Also, controlling the number and ownership of direct connections to the Internet backbone is used by ISPs to discourage security threats to the Internet.
With respect to connections between the ISP and the ISP clients, typically, an ISP provides a private/proprietary communication system to connect ISP clients to the ISP. Further, the ISP maintains one or more direct connections to the public Internet and provides the bridge connection between the public Internet and the private/proprietary communication system connecting the ISP to the ISP clients. The direct connections to the Internet are implemented, many times, via a wired system with sufficient bandwidth that the aggregate data usage of the ISP clients is not limited by the ISP connections to the Internet. However, the bandwidth of the communication system connecting the ISP to the clients has generally been bandwidth limited.
In the early days of Internet use, a typical communication system connecting the ISP to the ISP clients used phone modems that, eventually, operated up to 56 kbps (kilo bits per second). As the popularity of the Internet increased, a desire for faster client connections also increased. Thus, many ISPs began to provide “broadband” access in the 256 kbps to 1 Mbps (mega bits per second), or greater, speed ranges between the ISP and the ISP client. With time, the available “broadband” speeds increased to a typical current speed of 5-6 Mbps with speeds of 20 Mbps or higher available from some ISPs. Some of the typical “broadband” communication systems include: satellite based communications, cable modem based communications (i.e., based on the cable television connections already in place), and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology.
While “broadband” connections made ISP client access to the Internet significantly faster than the prior phone modem technology, the communication system connection between the ISP and the ISP client still remained a significant bottleneck in the potential speed of access for ISP clients. Depending on the technology, the bandwidth (effective size of the communication pipe between the ISP and the ISP client) was shared between multiple clients and the usage of one client could adversely affect other clients. For other “broadband” technologies, the communication speed in “bits per second” was relatively fast, but due to the connection medium and signal travel distance, a significant amount of the response time between requesting a web page and receiving the web page at the ISP client location was due to the time latency needed for the signal to travel the full signal travel distance to and from the ISP and not as much for the actual communication speed in “bits per second.”